


Brass Ceiling

by kalliel



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Abuse, Alcohol Abuse/Alcoholism, Character Study, Experimental Style, Explicit Language, Gen, Gore, Longform Journalism, POV Outsider, Poverty, Violence, Women Being Awesome, Women of Supernatural, family does end in blood sometimes, life on the margins, questionable cuisine, rural America, the hunting life
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-09-12
Updated: 2011-09-12
Packaged: 2018-04-08 09:05:31
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,160
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4298838
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/kalliel/pseuds/kalliel
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Hunting is the difference between skipping town because the rent's overdue and skipping town because there's a werewolf two states over.  It's the difference between being a murderer and being a big damn hero.  Gwen and hers have got it coming, and there is no getting out--only strapping in.  </p><p>Gwen Campbell, and what it means to be a woman on the fringe.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Brass Ceiling

"Usually call 'em brass, even if they're not," says Gwen, rolling a bullet casing down her knuckles. She flips it into her palm with the ease of what must be a lifetime of practice. "Aluminum, steel, nickel-plate. Whatever the hell you can find around."

It's not a typical response, and it's not an answer at all. But it isn't every day you're asked about the house fire that killed your aunt--a fire thirty years cold. And Gwen Campbell was only two-and-a-half when it happened. She reminds me of this, and asks if I'm planning on making an arrest today. Or did I want an eyewitness account, maybe. But where are her manners--do I feel welcome? Her eyes stand out, dark and anger-creased, resentment folded into crows' feet. Her hair is pulled back with a rubber band, leaving her jawline bare and clearly unimpressed. Her hands never once stop juggling brass.

"This is about the Winchesters, isn't it." Rounds disappear into the magazine. Click, magazine to handgrip. Next weapon. "I'm not part of their entourage."

In 1983, something happened in Lawrence, Kansas, I insist. It took down a family, and the aftershock wiped all their relatives out of the continental U.S.; she should know as much, because with the disappearance of her cousin, some Christian Campbell, she's the only one left. If 'left' is what it's called--no address, no employment, no insurance. She's a ghost in her own country.

She laughs; I'm too melodramatic. Kansas had it coming, she says. She's loading her truck--lock box with enough artillery to put down half the county, dry bag, tool kit, clothes--and with every heave she gives up one more Campbell building block: Kansas had it coming since 1946. Bought the house, the darling lawn, the floral pot holders. Jell-O in the pantry, truck in the garage, middle class plastered all up on the front porch. At least, that's the way her father told her, and her granduncle told him. The Samuel and Deanna Campbells took their GI Bill, bought themselves a new life, and never looked back. The daughter Mary was a cheerleader at Lawrence High School and graduated in the top 40 of her class. Mary dreamed high. 

"Seems like such a sweet little sob story, doesn't she," says Gwen, and slams shut the truck bed door.

Gwen Campbell doesn't have a hometown, or an alma mater; nor do her parents, nor theirs. "Got a little Appalachia, some Baltimore," Gwen claims, and lists a track off the East Coast and through the Midwest, down South and back again. A constellation of fast-moving rent-ditching criss-crossing travel tearing apart the United States. Montana, mostly--Big Fork for a while; Whitefish, on the railroad. One summer in Charlotte, North Carolina, and another just south, in Greenville. Four years in Sandy, Utah. 

Her father was more drunk in Sandy than anywhere else, which amuses Gwen now, because Sandy doesn't stock liquor. They didn't put the fear of God in him, but they must have put it in whatever he was hunting after, because he never found it.

 _Hunting,_ Gwen repeats. Don't tell me you came all the way out here and stayed that fucking ignorant, say her eyes, and her jawline, and her small tight fists. Don't tell me you don't know what that word means--what it means to me and mine. But I don't, not yet: She says fuck it, we're going to do this quick and dirty. She hops into the truck bed once more and throws back a tarp.

There's a strangled woman in the back of Gwen Campbell's car. She's naked save the red purple green ring around her neck and the swollen stab wound through her heart. She has fangs, and claws, and crocodile scales. What do you think? Gwen asks, proud. Not of the kill, but of the sickness on my face. Are you repulsed? she asks. Ready to go home, chalk it up to a bad trip, and go back to writing the classifieds?

Gwen is part of a world that should never be found, is what I manage.

"That's what you all've been saying about us since before we found the monsters." And Gwen spits. "You're gonna have to find someone else to tell that story. Get out of my driveway."

 

\--

 

Jaime is a Saltzman, not a Campbell, but he's as related to Gwen as it seems anyone still living is going to get. He is thirty-seven, and already an old man; as far as the county records are concerned, he is childless. Like Gwen, he is a hunter. I meet him at home, a single-wide trailer with a tar roof and vinyl windows.

"Windows're new," Jaime grunts, and waves toward the sun-bleached panes as he limps up the front steps. His left leg is stiff and shaky when he gives it any of his weight. "Put 'em in when me and Doreen moved up here." Doreen hitched it back to Tallahassee three, four years ago when she said she'd "get herself outta the life," Jaime explains when I ask after Doreen. Not far back, he says, when I ask when they'd moved. Three, four years ago. He's still moving in, Doreen's still moving out. There's boxes stacked to the roof like palace arches when we enter.

It's a shoes-on household, linoleum worn gray down the center walk. Jaime's boots ride heavy on the floor. The floor sags and air bubbles slide underneath like parasitic guests; furniture made from clothing and empty boxes closes in from either side. Jaime stops before a metal fold-out desk, with a tablecloth of sooty denim and a centerpiece of firearms and whiskey. Hunters measure years in the lifetimes of their jackets and their jeans: Jaime's life is on display before me, and it has been a long year.

Jaime's put miles between us since letting me through the door. So when I ask without preamble, "What do you know about Gwen Campbell?" I know he's had ample time to cut a lie.

Instead he says, "Know as much about her as she does about me." He shrugs off his jacket, which becomes carpet where it lands. Belt, next. The sibilance of leather across denim; it writhes as he drops it to the floor. Then his pants. A pop and a hiss as he looses the button, zipper of his jeans. They fall with everything else. "Wanna find out?"

Jaime has a jagged line of mottled purple stitches that run diagonal across his thigh, skin a tender puckered peacocked mess. He takes the whiskey by the neck and turns toward me. His eyes are judgment. The rest of him is Feckin, stitches, and cock.

I stare back.

"Hunting accident," he says. Then he lifts the bottle to his lips, knocks back a mouthful, and turns away. "And I don't know nothing about any Gwen. I never knew no Gwen." He offers up four more names with two addresses, one cell phone, and one regular bar between them, and an invitation for me to get the hell off the porch he doesn't have. 

As I leave, he peers through the vinyl windows that he does. Jaime is one more part of a world that will never be found. 

That's when I realize I never asked about the Kansas fire.

 

\--

 

Sue is a pseudonym. We meet outside a Longs Drugs far from the area code I've called to find her. She is the black turtleneck and gray tapered pants and black gloves and gray Adi Buckle boots to Jaime's naked puckered scars.

Is she in trouble? she asks of Gwen. Sue doesn't sound at all the Austin she claims she's never left.

"Well, is she?"

A garbage truck trundles past and I smell the body of a rotted woman, strangled throat and bloated peacock breasts. Crocodile down her arms. Two months ago Gwen Campbell had a dead body in the back of her truck, and she's probably had a couple dozen since. If she's in trouble, or only breeding it, the nation hasn't noticed either way.

"She's a good girl," Sue says suddenly, when I cannot respond. "Always looked after the children. And she had such an imagination."

How did Sue know her?

"Married to her father sixteen years, bless him," she says. So she is Gwen's mother? "Sure," she says. "Sure, you could say that. I think so, yes."

Sue and her husband, whose name she never gives, lived near Austin in a big house in Barton Creek. Gwen and her sisters and a little cousin grew up there. They never moved; "that's no way to raise children." He had so many cousins, she says of her husband. They couldn't bear to move away from that. Such a big, close family; seemed like people were visiting all the time. And he loved to entertain, her husband. She speaks of summers spent in strawberries, white lace she and the aunties would dress the children in. Porch swings and lemonade, the festivity of Christmas dinner. And golf, she says. Barton Creek had the best golf courses in all of Texas. He loved golf.

She removes her gloves, hands sweat-clammy and overwarm inside them, runs her hands over her knuckles and their small white scars when she corrects me next. No, her husband never hunted. The family never moved, and her husband never hunted. Gwen, she--did she tell me that? Even growing up, Gwen had such an imagination. But she's a sweet girl. She is.

I ask her if she's seen Gwen recently.

"Oh, all the time. I tell you, she's the most darling thing. People say your children grow up and forget about you but not Gwennie." Not sweet Gwennie, who comes to Sunday dinner, who is getting married soon (Sue blushes and says she's not allowed to tell anyone that). Little Gwennie is the sweetest most darling thing, gonna be married to a lawyer from Dallas. Whole family's gonna be there for the wedding. 

I tell her she seems very close to the rest of the Campbells. She nods enthusiastically. Short gray hair falls into her eyes. She runs her fingers over her knuckles and her scars and tells me they are an intensely loving family. I don't ask after her husband, Gwen's nameless golfing father, but I wonder whether she knew anything about the fire? Because I'd heard there'd been a Campbell house fire a while back?

"Saddest thing," says Sue, superlative to the last. But I shouldn't worry; there were no casualties. "There were some insurance issues, you know how it goes. Whole family pitched in to support them afterwards, though. That's the kind of family the Campbells are."

Did she know where the fire had been?

Her brow furrows and she says she couldn't tell me the exact neighborhood, but "Arkansas, for sure." 

Sue's hands shake and she returns them to her gloves. "We gave those children--we gave Gwen--a good life. You're too young to understand how hard that can be. But we did. We did our best by them. We did."

 

\--

 

Margo is a Saltzman, too. She's never heard of Sue Campbell, but "she sounds like a lyin' whore."

"Women that side of the family are absolutely batshit," she says. Margo is elbow-deep in the blood and entrails of an animal I cannot identify. She has a crateful of organs to her left, and a small bowl filled with warped silver to her right. Caught a shapeshifter down by the railroad, she explains. Get one to change into something big and mean, 'stead of a human or a cat or nothing, you can win twice on one hunt. She wipes dark, wiry hair back towards her sagging ponytail without cleaning her hands. Yells at Creaser (whom I never meet) to hurry his ass up and get the oven ready; she's almost done in here.

"Kinda tastes like sulfur, at first," she explains. But a good hunt'll feed your crew for a week. And you preserve it right, dry it out and salt it down, it all tastes like pork in the end. It's because shifters are probably omnivores. Creaser has a degree in biology from UC Boulder, she explains, so he knows that kind of thing. "Don't know much else, though." She yells back and asks him if he's ready with the fucking oven yet.

Margo doesn't know too much about any Campbells, but Gwen sounds familiar. "An't that the one stuck a machete in Jaime? That job up near Stovall--Creaser, an't she the one?"

Creaser mutters something indistinct, from a room I am not entirely sure exists in truth.

"Hunting accident, he says," Margo translates. She's still cleaning her carcass. "Guess I never knew no Gwen, then. My mistake."

I tell her that's exactly what Jaime said. Margo shrugs. "Must be true, now you heard it twice. Though two lies is better than the truth, anyway."

I am looking for the truth.

"You an't," she says. "You're looking for a story. Lookin' for literary symmetry. Say, d'you like our dinosaur?"

Their dinosaur is a large brass figure preying on the highway. It was Creaser's idea. Pulls in a lot of traffic off the main drag, she confesses proudly, and wipes her hands down her canvas apron before she turns to hand me a business card. Her fingers smudge the corners anyway (she has no prints).

She and Creaser are starting up a jerky shack up here, for during their downtime. They call it Monster Jerky, hence the dinosaur, and their tagline is SALT AND BURN.

"You want a sample?"

 

\--

 

Jaime's leads reveal a string of hunters, suppliers of hunters, fuck buddies of hunters, all of whom save for Sue claim they never knew no Gwen. Instead, there is a fire trail of things gone and emptied, old tired folk or haunted young ones. No one knows nothing, and they are willing to tell less--for the most part just names, and not all of them real. Sue and Margo are the only two who agreed to meet in person; and there is no hunters' headquarters. The registry of business and commerce in Blaine County, Nebraska lists a Harvelle's Roadhouse, but as of May 2007 the premises are a scorched vacant lot owned by state, one more open cold case that did not survive its trial by fire.

Still, the names of people like Gwen stick out like intermittent road signs, and if they lead to no cohesive whole, perhaps that _is_ the whole story: the scattered, unaffiliated masses. But perhaps I'm a lying whore.

Eventually, I end up back on Gwen Campbell's doorstep. Not the same one as before--this time it's a one-room, one-bath cabin thirty miles out from Dillon, Montana.

"You come asking about more house fires, or are you planning to start one?" is her greeting, which does not surprise me. I’m surprised, however, when my response is couched in a description of Jaime Saltzman’s stitches. I do not tell her about Sue, nor Margo. But I look at Gwen now and am caught between Sue's Sunday dinner lie and the lie of the Saltzmans never having known her. I think of the machete in her backseat.

Gwen's mostly just surprised that Jaime was the best I could find. The closest I could get. But then, I'd come to her about the Kansas fire. She's not interested in talking about Jaime, though. In fact, she refuses: Did he mention Doreen? And did I look her up? When I say yes to the former and no to the latter, she is disappointed. 

"Because she's a woman?"

Because there are 1434 Doreens in Tallahassee alone.

"She was a Doreen in Sandy, first," says Gwen, vaguely mollified. They didn't count their Doreens there. She was seventeen at the time and as pretty as she was ever going to get. (Not very.) But Jaime married her in Sandy. They were both hunters. As such they had enough sense to swear off children--at least, with each other. And that’s the end of their story; nothing special. No machetes. No lemonade, neither.

“What, did you expect a fairy tale?” Gwen asks, and flashes a razor wire smile, stretched dry lips with a thin sharp line of teeth between them. I think of the fairy tale in Texas. I think of literary symmetry. "We're hunters."

The way Gwen remembers Sandy (Utah, she repeats. Never Texas. Where did I get that idea?), it’s a suburb built out of Campbell children. "I was fourteen," she says. Fourteen and gangly. Small for her age, and shrew-like. They were all skinny, her thirteen siblings and her. Her siblings came in steps and halves, cousins and godsons. "The Campbells have a lot of orphans,” she explains. “Or maybe just a lot of dead."

Is Gwen one of the orphans?

Gwen shrugs. "You see my father somewhere, be sure and let my mother's ashes know."

Gwen's father, Shaler, went by SH for most of Gwen's childhood. His wife in Sandy, who was not Gwen's mother and who was not actually named Sue, worked as a waitress. SH worked as an unemployed surveyor. He went out nights and when he came home bloody-handed, you got out of the way.

 "You learned to love seeing blood on his hands," Gwen says, and runs fingers over her own knuckles. They stick and pull on pale clean skin, like she's marking hot invisible fingerprints across the back of her hands. Like not-mother like daughter. "You learned to love the monsters. Because if he didn't get it out there, he'd still be looking when he walked through that front door. ...You ever played golf?"

I have not.

But she tells me that the folks in Sandy, they played golf. The pastor with the congregation down the street played golf. They'd go out Tuesdays to fine, manicured green and sail small white balls unto Heaven. "My father played golf, too," Gwen said. At the golf course in Sandy, there's a particularly tricky Hole 13. Hole's in a valley, and around it the ground ripples. It's all been steamrolled flat, but this one hole _rolls_. It's the funniest thing. 

 "There's lawn grafts you can use, you know." Gwen mimes a square. "Grass you can tear up in neat patches, bury anything you want. Make a casing of grass. It's all earth inside, of course." But you know. If you're the new trash in town, and you got some-teen identical round white faces tagging after you, no one tries too hard to count them. No one thinks too hard if they count thirteen one day, and eleven the next.

To this day, the pastors still play the course. They say that Hole 13--that's where the Devil's stepped. But they suspect nothing. To this day, they suspect nothing.  
 And what of SH's wife, the woman who is not Gwen's mother? Where was she?

"Paying the rent. Going to church. Feeding the mouths. Sometimes you pray for a miracle; in Sandy, she got two. Must've been a doubly righteous woman."

Gwen rolls a stray bullet casing beneath her boot. Brass. (Or maybe they just call it that. Maybe underneath the name, the expectation, it's something else entirely.) "Dean Winchester played golf," is the first thing she says about her Kansas cousins, who are several shades off family. She tells me they'd gone over to his girlfriend's house a couple months back and done some casual closet digging. Dean with his nine iron and his bowl of fruit and his housewife _Vogue_. "Hard to forget that when you're judging someone's practical worth." When asked if she succeeded, Gwen doesn't answer immediately. Finally: "I can live with Dean.

But I never forget."

 

\--

 

You learn to love your monsters. "There's no getting out"--and this, Gwen repeats. Coda and refrain, over and again. The house in Kansas, and the porch, and the lawn--that was getting out. "Hunting skinwalkers on your Sundays off don't keep you a hunter. Old Samuel found that one out the hard way." She smiles, like Samuel is a naughty secret in his own right. Would I like to see him? she asks, though it's been forty years, and there are no more tarps to pull away from greying skin and distended bellies.

I say no.

"Suit yourself."

Coda and refrain: There is no getting out.

"Doreen's dead, by the way." Gwen's nonchalance is chilling. "Girl can't spend her life hunting and assume nothing's gonna hunt her back, just 'cause she gets tired of the life."

You wanted to know about the fire, Gwen says. And that's what she knows. They had it coming. Doreen had it coming. They all have it coming. Gwen does, too, and she doesn't mind. She'll meet it head on. "Gonna go down with a gun in my hand even if my spine's getting shoved up my ass," she says. Truck's packed; she's going hunting tonight. "Learned a long time ago that's the only way to end it. I was fourteen, remember."

 

\--

 

Gwen was fourteen and gangly in Sandy, Utah. Second oldest. The only girl. In Sandy, all the churches worked hard to put the fear of God in the air, bleach all the shadows out. This would have been good, if SH was not one of those men who, after a lifetime of losing big, had become obsessed with winning small. 

He could not win against what was not there. Gwen and the rest of them stayed four years in Sandy with her father shooting at things more invisible than ghosts.

In those four long years, Gwen noticed things. She saw cracks in the walls and dust in the corners, red-brown creases at the edges of the trim that will never come clean. She saw imbalanced walls and sagging doorways, locks that creaked but did not turn, and she saw that their little mat of lawn that was not a lawn but weeds. She saw dirty cheeks and thin worn shirts, shoes with holes and bolonga sandwiches with ketchup every day for lunch.

And Sandy saw them. Sandy, from its project houses--its identical darling lawns, its floral pot holders, its Jell-O in its pantries, its trucks in its garages, its middle class pride plastered up on all the porches-- _saw_ them. And it stared. It judged.

And Gwen saw herself being spat out and left the fuck behind. There is only so high you can reach from rock bottom.

Fifteen years and three hundred miles away from Sandy, Gwen drums her knuckles against the steel of her truck in Dillon and makes a rumbling that sounds like war drums. She gestures toward the neat stack cargo in her truck bed. "This is what we know," she says. "Hunting's not the problem. It's the only way out."

Hunting is the difference between skipping town because the rent's overdue and skipping town because there's a werewolf two states over. It's the difference between being a murderer and being a big damn hero. People like Sam understand that, says Gwen. The ruthless ones. They're the ones that don't have anything better going for them; hunting comes as natural as breathing.

And the people who don't hunt? Who can't, or won't?

"You're not us." Gwen and hers have got it coming, and there is no getting out--only strapping in. 

Being a hunter is the difference between living the story no one else wants to see and living the story no one _gets_ to see. That's their ceiling. Their best shot.

"So look me in the eyes and tell me I can't hate anyone who'd try to give that up." That's what Gwen thinks about the house fire in Kansas, the Samuel and Deanna Campbells, the John and Mary Winchesters. She asks me if we're done yet. She doesn't want to waste her time, because you get left behind, you get left behind. And she doesn't plan on letting that happen to her anymore. She's headed down the I-80, somewhere; there's a fast lane of ghouls and wraiths and plague rushing toward the Great Lakes, and she aims to beat them to the pier.

What about people like Dean? The ones who come back?

Gwen frowns. Dean with his nine iron and his bowl of fruit and his housewife _Vogue_. Dean with his Hell and his Colt and his sharp damn tongue. She rolls a bullet casing down her knuckles, flips it into her palm with the ease of what must be a lifetime of practice. "Generally use brass, because it doesn't break down. You can pick 'em up, reload. Go with what you got and keep re-forming."

It's not a typical response, and it's not an answer at all. But I am not surprised.

"Catch you on the B-side," says Gwen. She's done talking; if I want any more, I'll have to wait until next week, she says.

Tonight she's hunting Eve.


End file.
